In the Dead of Summer (6 page)

“I don’t think I’m making it up,” I said. “There’s something wrong about this summer session.”

“There’s something wrong about this summer,” Flora said. “Half the kids in the city have shot the other half within the last two weeks, for starters.”

“How else could we have won our infamous hostility title?” I asked. “What a claim to fame. But maybe I’m a part of the problem. Maybe I’m the whole problem.”

“For the city?” she asked. “For gangs? For drive-by shootings? For hate mongers on radio and TV? For—”

I put my hand up. “For my own problems. I can’t get in synch with most of these kids, and I keep wondering what I’m doing there, aside from needing a paycheck. And then I see you, and you’re always self-possessed, elegant, on track…”

She put down her fork before it reached her mouth. Flaky pink salmon was still attached to the prongs. She looked at me as if I were insane, and then she looked overwhelmingly sad.

“What?” I asked. “I only said
…
What is it?”

Her hair was close-cropped, her only ornamentation amber hoop earrings and dark coral lipstick that contrasted with her café au lait skin. She was starkly chic in the way only beautiful women can manage.

“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I was stunned, how you could think I’m cool and collected.” It was her turn to shake her head, slowly, with wonder. Her earrings swung back and forth like double metronomes. “I’m going through a…I can’t believe it doesn’t show. I try not to let it, but I was sure it was obvious. But no point to talking about it. It has nothing to do with your teaching problems. Nothing to do with school. I think.”

She thought? There was an invitation to further probing if ever I’d heard one. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “I didn’t mean to imply you’re incapable of having problems. I apologize if somehow I’ve hurt your feelings.”

She shrugged. “It’s nothing you did. It’s reality. Look, even in the City of Brotherly Love, not all brothers are equally loved. Things happen. To sisters, too. It’s not like I’ve lived my life without being aware that some people have problems, and they think their problems have to do with my skin’s color.”

For a moment all the air disappeared. We had suddenly hit something way beyond my capacities for assistance. Something so deep in the fabric of our society, I wanted to pretend it was dead and buried, the way it should be.

The way it looked to be in the square today. On every side people were enjoying the day and the site. I wanted to deny Flora’s obvious statement of fact. I wanted to say “Don’t be silly—look. Right here.” An old-fashioned Norman Rockwell cover for the
Saturday Evening Post.
Only the outfits had changed.

Elderly women, wrapped up despite the heat, slowly made their way on the walkways. Summer students, including April and Model T and Miles and X and Manuel, sat on the lip of the fish fountain, talking and laughing, their feet immersed in its cool waters. Nearby, three younger boys spun a Frisbee across a corner of the square as a young child and his uniformed nanny watched. One of the Frisbee players had freckled milky skin and white-gold hair, a second was olive-skinned and heavy-featured; the third had skin the color of smoke and wore dreadlocks. The little boy was Asian, with gleaming black bangs above chubby cheeks, and the small uniformed woman caring for him had the broad, strong features of a sunny Latin country.

Reader’s Digest
would make a cunning anecdote out of this sliver of Americana. Except the reason the sight had so impressed me was because it was rare. It was how it was supposed to be, more or less, but not how it was. And next to me I could feel Flora struggle for words to suggest that this was illusion and not the picture at all.

“That’s horrible and true,” I said. “And unfortunately not news. But you seem shaken up by something less abstract—something more personal. Did somebody say something? Did something happen to you?”

“More or less.” She looked at me. “I’m not trying to be oblique or coy. It’s just that I don’t know what’s going on. It could be a fluke, a crazy kid prank, even. I remember all those crank calls asking if your refrigerator was running, then saying to go catch it. Maybe this is somebody with a really bad sense of humor.”

“Somebody phoned you?”

“Somebody has been leaving messages on my answer machine the last few days.
Several
bodies. Male voices, all of them, although maybe not full adults—one voice broke in the middle of his big macho putdown—and I didn’t recognize any of them. Pretty similar messages. They all used my name. As in, ‘Go back to Africa, Flora,’ to quote one of the milder ones.” She said her own name with contempt, imitating the voice, spitting it out as if it were a curse. “Obviously, they didn’t know I was born in Cincinnati,” she said dryly. But she blinked several times and bit at her bottom lip.

Across from us, the group around the fountain abruptly fractured. X pointed and shouted at a thin figure partially obliterated from my sightline by a tree. April immediately swung her legs over the edge, picked up her shoes, and ran barefoot across the street and into the school. I thought of how, every day before lunch and after each tutoring session, she looked out the classroom window. I’d thought she was checking the weather, but perhaps that wasn’t it at all.

I leaned forward, to try and see who was behind the tree, but the figure was already in motion, running away from our side of the square.

Miles loped after April, and Model T ran—with shoes on—in the direction of the man who’d been behind the tree. So much for the tranquil tableau of a moment ago.

So much for Flora’s peace of mind. I pictured her forcing herself to listen, over and over, to foul words and malevolent messages, needing to learn whatever she could from the tape.

“My machine message doesn’t say my name, only the number. My first name isn’t in the book, only my initial.
Jones
isn’t necessarily any one race, and I live around the corner—definitely a mixed neighborhood. So it wasn’t some random crank. My caller knew me, named me, targeted me. I feel…tagged, like those animals they use the stun guns on.” She paused and studied her hands. Her fingers were long and tapering, and her nails matched the dark coral of her lipstick.

She put her lacquered box, its contents untouched, beside her on the bench. “Maybe it started when I was so upset about that Jewish cemetery. Remember?”

I couldn’t follow her until I realized she was talking about the cemetery of Mikveh Israel, a Colonial synagogue, that had been defaced with graffiti the week before.

“Some people have such big hates that even when people have been dead and gone for hundreds of years, they still have to go after them.”

The vandals had desecrated four gravestones, one of which was that of Rebecca Gratz, the model for Sir Walter Scott’s Rebecca in
Ivanhoe
.
They’d spray-painted a jagged, sloppy, sideways bolt of lightning on it. I had tried to find some literary connection, but couldn’t.

All the graffiti was meaningless. Haym Solomon, who financed the American Revolution, had something akin to a scarlet A on his stone. Two other markers had also been defaced with initials, and several stones tipped over. Random rage. Senseless destructiveness.

“I wrote a letter to the editor about it,” Flora said. “They printed it in Monday’s
Inquirer.
The day before the calls started.”

“Except how would they have gotten your phone number?” I asked.

She shook her head and sighed again. “Talk about not feeling like you belong here. That’s why I said you shouldn’t make up problems that aren’t given to you.”

“That’s awful,” I whispered, knowing my words were pathetically inadequate.

“It feels like hell to be hated,” she said. “Particularly by somebody who doesn’t know you. That makes you an object, a symbol, not a person.” She shook her head so that her earrings bounced. “And to have them be faceless, nameless, anonymous, so all you’re getting is the hate itself, like bad breath blowing on you. There’s always a certain level of this stuff, but I feel something more in my bones. Something worse and growing.”

Around us the square was semideserted. Most of the students were gone, scattered. The nanny had whisked her charge away from the running students, and the Frisbee game had ended. Isolated people made their way from one corner to another, or sat quietly on benches. I wondered at the change. It seemed connected to the chase of the person behind the tree, although nothing had come of that, either. I wondered who he’d been and what was so provocative about him. And I wondered at the learned skittishness of everyone who’d taken for cover as soon as anything out of the ordinary began.

“It’s like how they say we always carry viruses in us,” Flora said. “We don’t even notice them. We fight them off. Only sometimes, when our resistance is down, they take over. Well, if hate’s a virus, and why shouldn’t it be, then that’s what it feels is happening now. Something in us has gotten weak, and the virus is running rampant. There’s an epidemic going on. A plague.”

The midday weather stayed hot, the pavement still reflected glaring bits of light, and the pattern of leaves on the grass didn’t change. But all the same, I could have sworn that an enormous cloud had obliterated the sun, and that we were suddenly shivering and in the dark.

*

Friday was not one of April’s tutoring afternoons, and I was glad to leave for home an hour earlier. I was exhausted and increasingly disheartened, still thinking about Flora. Phone calls were small potatoes by today’s violent standards, yet their purpose remained mean-spirited, and their effects were painful and profound.

I scanned the room for left-behind valuables and erased the board. And then I went to lower the shades against the sun and heat, and that made me think about April’s habit of looking out, and about the mystifying scene around the fountain this noon.

The square was almost empty now, except for the through traffic of our rapidly exiting students and some postnap children out with their mothers or au pairs. The little park was a touchstone for me, an oasis against de-humanization and ugliness. And I loved my vantage point, from what was the second story of the school, but which, given the high ceilings of the ground floor, would be almost the third story elsewhere. I saw the tops of people’s heads and very few features, but the perspective made the goings-on seem like an impressionistic painting from another era.

I watched, feeling a measure of peace return, then shatter when a bark of noise cut through and above the traffic. A backfire, my mind registered—at the corner across from the school, where people waited for the light to change.

But one of those people, a slender dark-haired boy, levitated. Rose from the ground, as if jerked from above, arced, then landed on the pavement, on his back.

I had seen that violent leap before, in films, on TV, but it was the stuff of stunt men and illusion. It didn’t belong in real life. Except in headlines that had nothing to do with my life. It did not compute. It didn’t belong here.

Not at my school, near children, near students and babies and nurses. At the square. No matter what was in the headlines every day. A plague on all our houses—except mine. Reality belonged elsewhere.

A woman standing near the boy waved her arms at the figure on the sidewalk, then at nothing while she screamed and screamed.

The dark-haired boy didn’t move. A crowd cautiously gathered around him—Philly Prep students, mostly. They looked at the ground, and then turned in semicircles, looking for the assailant. When I saw them tilt up my way, I realized both my hands were at my mouth, muffling a scream I was too terrified to utter. The eyes moved on beyond me, to the roof, back to earth. The nannies scooped up their charges and backed off from the corner where the boy lay.

I shuddered, and ran down to the office. “Call for help!” I shouted.

Helga didn’t question me or protest or tell me to do it myself.

“A shooting. A drive-by.” I hated that there was a word for it, that it was common enough to have been named, to have become a category of killing. “There’s a boy on the sidewalk on the corner.”

Helga had the receiver in one hand, but she kept her eyes on me as she dialed. With her free hand she offered me a box of tissues.

Only then did I realize I was crying and must have been for some time.

YOU
ADAPT. THE WORLD BECOMES MORE FRIGHTENING,
but it doesn’t stop, so you become more cautious, more twitchy, which means you lose a little bit of your perceived freedom, but that’s how it is.

The dead boy turned out to have been named Vo Van Tran. He was twenty years old and a member of a Vietnamese gang. That didn’t help anything make sense, it merely labeled it. They thought he’d been killed instantly by a shot from a passing car. By whom, nobody knew. A rival gang, it was assumed. Nobody seemed overly concerned about why he’d been murdered. It happened all the time.

And nobody, including me, had seen anything helpful. I hadn’t been watching the traffic flow, and try though I did, I couldn’t remember any specific car, anything that had caught my attention while I lowered the shades. The police could barely believe that an eyewitness could have such a poor eye. All I could establish was that I, along with every other person who’d been there, hadn’t seen anybody on foot running away. Which left it classified as a drive-by. One more unsolved murder.